Like it or not, Cbus now city's nickname

Friday

Feb 28, 2014 at 12:01 AMFeb 28, 2014 at 11:07 AM

On Wednesday, the Central Ohio Transit Authority announced that its new Downtown circulator, a free bus line that will run from the Short North to the German Village area, will be called the Cbus. Cbus! Now there's a nickname. It's actually been around more than a decade, though it's not clear who started it.

Lori Kurtzman, The Columbus Dispatch

As far as nicknames go, let’s just say Columbus hasn’t had the greatest options.

Cowtown? Ooh, that’s flattering.

Arch City? Sure. Zzzzz.

COLS? Does that rhyme with holes or falls? Has anyone ever said this out loud?

Anyway, there might be a better option, one that’s finally gaining legitimacy. On Wednesday, the Central Ohio Transit Authority announced that its new Downtown circulator, a free bus line that will run from the Short North to the German Village area, will be called the Cbus.

Cbus! Now there’s a nickname. It’s actually been around more than a decade, though it’s not clear who started it.

Jim Rome has long used it on his nationwide sports-talk radio show, and someone in 2004 entered it into the Internet’s please-don’t-read-at-work Urban Dictionary:

The nickname got a bump the following year when Gabe Roth’s Cbus shirt design hit local clothing stores and Derek Grosso launched C-BUS Magazine, which published through 2008.

“It was something that young professionals were using,” said Grosso, who founded the Columbus Young Professionals Club. “It’s definitely more popular now.”

Roth, an Ohio State University graduate who founded Columbus Urban Threads, had heard the word, too.

But he’d never seen it on a T-shirt. So he sketched his design, jamming a vintage bus between the letters C and BUS, and has sold it on more than 30,000 shirts over nine years.

“I didn’t think it would get picked up by as many places as it did,” Roth said. “It’s been around and it’s still selling.”

But who said it first? Roth doesn’t know. Neither does the Columbus Historical Society or Experience Columbus.

Grosso said he heard it first on Rome’s show, though we’re not willing to give him credit just yet. (Rome didn’t respond to a request for an interview.)

Dan Williamson, spokesman for Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman, said he thinks it might have popped up 10 or 15 years ago, when even celebrities didn’t want to be burdened with the length of their names.

“It’s our J.Lo,” he said. (SAT answer: J.Lo is to Cbus as singer/actress/ American Idol judge Jennifer Lopez is to Columbus.)

Wherever Cbus came from, it’s on the verge of becoming inescapable.

There’s Roth’s shirt and a bunch of others, including a Volkswagen-inspired design by Jim Jackson, founder of fashion brand State of Devotion. There’s an Upper Arlington bar called the Cbus Sports Pub, a 6-year-old annual cycling tour called Bike the C-Bus and the Cbus Pacers running group. And there’s the new Cbus bus, of course.

And this is all good news if you like the nickname, but what if you don’t?

Local cartoonist and customer-service rep Talcott Starr, 32, cringes at Cbus, too. When an organization said it was thinking of adding the moniker to its Twitter handle, Starr didn’t hold back: “I REALLY hate the ‘CBus’ nickname,” he tweeted.

“It feels a lot like marketing speak that kind of popped up inorganically,” he said.

But remember those alternatives, Talcott! Jackson, who designed a Cbus T-shirt, said the nickname bothered him when he first heard it, too. That was maybe 20 years ago. “It was awkward back then,” he said. “You heard other cities with great nicknames.”

Eventually, he grew to embrace it. “It was better than Cowtown,” he said. “Going to the airport and seeing those cow-tipping shirts was infuriating.”

lkurtzman@dispatch.com

@LoriKurtzman

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.